REVIEW

"The Art Student's War" by Brad Leithauser

Bea faces a philosophical artistic challenge beyond the technical one of creating likenesses: whether to prettify those portraits or be strictly realistic

November 20, 2009|By Art Winslow | Special to Tribune Newspapers

"The Art Student's War"By Brad LeithauserKnopf, 512 pages, $27.95

To engage in some literary hopscotch momentarily, consider that the poet and novelist Brad Leithauser, writing in Slate magazine on John Updike, connected his subject with Henry James's admonition that a writer should be "one of the people on whom nothing is lost." Now listen to Bianca Paradiso, the central character in Leithauser's new novel "The Art Student's War," as she mentally rehearses the mantra of one of her art professors: "An artist never stops mixing paint."

Those are variants of the same thought, from observation to execution, translating life into art, and Leithauser introduces it on the first page of the novel, his own nothing-lost paean to the World War II-era city of Detroit and the dynamics of a family that sprang from the union of a hard-working Italian immigrant and a woman of Bavarian extraction always quick to point out that "she was nobody's Italian wife."

Bianca - Bea to many but Bia (be uh) to her father, Vico - is a dreamy 18-year-old on a streetcar when we meet her, someone who "observes everything" yet "cannot bear to meet anyone's eyes" directly and is prone to emotional overindulgence, according to family lore. She wears a red felt hat, as indicative of character as any piece of clothing could be, a tall young woman who stoops accommodatingly and is guilt-stricken over not clearly thanking a soldier on crutches who had complimented her aboard the streetcar. And then he was gone.

That simple incident presages many of the thematic elements that Leithauser will pose and reformulate in this closely observed novel, which is like a time capsule in its re-creation of Detroit (when it was known as "the arsenal of democracy" for its output of war materiel) and in its tight domestic focus: the evanescence of experience, the fallout of an irretrievable act, the limitations of our insights into each other, the ways that passion can motivate but also mutate into destructive form. The petty hatreds that can accompany love and friendship, without being a contradiction in terms. The street the Paradisos live on? It's named Inquiry.

"Even if you faced them head-on, who could uncover the real underpinnings of any family? Who could isolate its truth?" wonders Bianca late in "The Art Student's War," as it dawns on her that her younger brother, Stevie, "wasn't quite any Stevie she knew." And in fact a huge internecine war in the family plays out on the home front as the global conflict proceeds mostly in the background, save for the wounded soldiers who arrive back in a Detroit hospital, many of them sitting for portraits that Bea is doing under invitation of the USO (United Service Organizations).

Bea faces a philosophical artistic challenge beyond the technical one of creating likenesses: whether to prettify those portraits or be strictly realistic, sensing that part of her mission must be "to give them back their carefree boyish prewar faces." Beauty and its value in life and art are subject to debate elsewhere in these pages as well, whether before great paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts by several characters, or as embodied in Mamma's intense jealousy of her beautiful sister, Grace, Bea's beloved aunt.

Early in the novel, eavesdropping from a stairway landing, Bea had heard her mother accuse Papa, "It's Grace you've always loved." Mamma took the charge public at Grace's fortieth birthday party, held in a restaurant, telling her sister before the assembled family and anyone within earshot, "You stole Vico's heart." That "day which would live in infamy," as Leithauser has it, drove a wedge between the Paradisos and Grace and her husband, a pipe-smoking, science-fiction-reading doctor named Dennis Poppleton who is the closest thing to an angel in the book and had shared a deep friendship with Vico.

War is writ large and small by Leithauser, as totalizing as life, represented at a biological level too in an influenza epidemic (which catches Bianca in its grip) and at a social level in Detroit's race riot of 1943, which left thirty-four dead. The war was the largest thing Bianca ever felt, "with a sweep and a complexity burgeoning steadily over time," absorbed from newspapers and newsreels and chatter at the local bakery, and yet even with Uncle Dennis's explanations, she "discerned how its true dimensions escaped her."

"The Art Student's War" bears little resemblance to shock-ridden dysfunctional family tales which have become familiar to modern readers, incidentally. If anything, Leithauser could be accused of underplaying dramatic effects in favor of verisimilitude to the pain (and potential joy) of the everyday: parents and children at cross-purposes, confusion in romance, infidelity, problems with drink, aging without a sense of achievement, the elusiveness even to the waiting eye of "crystalline reality." When Bea holds the hand of one young soldier, she experiences a "thud-in-the-blood so potent it made her eyes water," something readers may encounter in the dispatches from this front.

Art Winslow is former executive editor and literary editor of The Nation.